While Collaborative Care is a proven solution to this crisis, implementing it in any medical system exposes unexpected challenges. As an implementation group shapes a Collaborative Care model to fit their local environment, there is no systematic method to determine which parts of the model can be modified or where flexibility might undermine success.
With the onset of COVID-19, primary care systems across the country are rapidly changing clinical operations to limit in-person ambulatory visits for infection-control reasons. The Primary care Academics Transforming Healthcare (PATH) collaborative quickly redesigned primary care in their institution to introduce telemedicine visits as a practical alternative to provide needed care remotely. The innovation was the rapid development and implementation of workflows to standardize billable telemedicine visits in the primary care setting.
UW Primary Care Academics Transforming Healthcare (PATH) collaborative was featured in an American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) news article highlighting their recently published article titled “A Simple Framework for Weighting Panels Across Primary Care Disciplines.” Read the AAFP article and interview with co-author Dr. Sandra Kamnetz here.
To read the publication, click here.
The UW Primary care Academics Transforming Healthcare (PATH) collaborative was recently formed to bridge primary care clinical transformation and rigorous scientific study in order to improve the UW Health system for the benefit of patients and communities. The collaborative is a multidisciplinary coalition of physicians and change leaders, and members are experienced in clinical delivery and span all three primary care departments (family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics), Quality, Safety, and Innovations, Population Health, and the Center for Patient Partnerships.
UW PATH will disseminate learnings locally and nationally, emphasizing scholarly contributions, and aims to enter the national discourse on primary care redesign by highlighting some of UW Health's important work to date.